As part of my fellowship for the OER Research Hub at the Open University I am sharing these excerpts from conversations about OER use/creation recorded in April 2014 with faculty at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

In explaining OERs to students and others, she draws the parallels with textbooks “the things that you need to be successful in class, without having to pay a lot for them”, and is interested, like others in the Maricopa Millions project with saving costs for her community college students

She notes an average geology textbook costs $150. She has been developing, and using for the first time this semester, her own textbook, created from public domain NASA, NOAA, US Geological resources and videos. Her platform is SoftChalk, which integrates into her college’s LMS (Canvas).

When asked, she reported that her students have no problem accepting the quality of her developed resources as replacement for a published textbook, but notes that a question if quality is typical response from her faculty colleagues

Beyond the assessment of student performance, looking at how much time students are spending on the activities, gives her feedback on where to adjust the materials. It also helps her gauge the content to match what is expected of students time spent in a hybrid course

Geology is nearly always a small department, so Sian’s OER efforts first in among the cases of other single innovators.

Like most of the other conversations in this series, the most typical way of explaining OERs is “like a textbook” but… where “textbook” might be a generic name for course materials.

Without knowing details of how SoftChalk provides student data, the potential for collection here of student performance, and also, time spent in modules, could be a potentially useful feature for the kind of studies the OER Research Hub is collecting.

The resources Sian finds most useful, whether one wants to define them as OERs, are videos from mainly YouTube. Is this the pervasiveness of content, the ease of embedding in other web content?

For relevance to OER Research Hub, the work of Sian aligns with hypotheses of

leading teachers to practice “critical reflection by educators, with evidence of improvement in their practice”

the remix approach leveraging existing content is one of “different usage and adoption patterns than other online resources”

The post "Maricopa OER Practitioners: Sian Proctor" was originally rescued from the bottom of a stangant pond at CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/2014/05/maricopa-oer-practitioners-sian-proctor/) on May 9, 2014.

3 Comments

Alan,
Please tell Sian that a digital storytelling unit can be a powerful OER assignment for Geology students.

As a lifelong rockhound, I wanted to be a geologist, but in 1968 at WSU (Washington), they were all about flunking out women in huge mass Geology 101 classes of literally hundreds of students; however, in spite of their best efforts, I retained my love of geology.

This digital story is one I made last year out at Cape Arago that combines a sense of place with some very specific Geology info (still at the 101 level!). It might give her some ideas for shaping her own assignment.